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Many of our clients use Situational Leadership® programs, based on the popular model to improve the interpersonal skills of leaders and managers. Situational Leadership helps leaders and managers adapt their communication approach with those whose performance they need to support and develop.It’s a powerful program that has helped many leaders and managers communicate more effectively in key working relationships. Like other programs that teach critical interpersonal soft skills, it can have significant impact on how leaders and managers relate with their people.

Like many programs for leaders and managers, Situational Leadership teaches how to communicate, how to relate to others, and how to have important conversations.We’re always happy when client organizations have adopted one of the Situational Leadership programs, or other coaching and leadership models and programs that teach critical soft skills.

However, when it comes to talent development, performance management, and conversations aimed at helping people improve how they contribute to the organization, it is also critical to know what to discuss.Leaders and managers must know how to describe two things, in actionable terms:

Desired performance for individuals or teams, and how it contributes to business results

Possible action steps for developing, improving or supporting that performance.

This might seem obvious, but most coaching or management development programs are vague, incomplete, or open to wide interpretation about what to talk about in coaching or management situations. They don't teach a vocabulary for describing the elements of performance that leaders and managers seek to develop or improve.

Our Performance Thinking® programs are distilled from decades of research in behavior science and performance engineering, then time-tested and refined in client organizations. We teach participants exactly what to discuss when pinpointing performance and agreeing on action steps for development or improvement of employee performance. We give participants an easy-to-understand, plain English, research-based vocabulary for describing performance and its drivers.

We use two visual models – the Performance Chain and the Six Boxes Model – to serve as guides and integrating frameworks for day-to-day performance development and leadership.Labeled with 21 plain English words, the models are easy to understand and apply. Participants in our programs begin with simple 1:1 coaching or management conversations, and then learn to extend application of the same models and logic to more complex team, departmental, or business unit performance.They literally learn a way of thinking and talking about performance that is flexible, precise, and powerful when applied at any level.

Our programs enable leaders and managers to accelerate business results through the performance of their people, and to support continuous talent development.Clients love these programs because they fill an important gap left between programs that help leaders and managers know how to talk with their people (such as Situational Leadership® and GROW coaching programs), and the specifics of the business performance they need to achieve, by teaching what to talk about.

We encourage you to super-charge soft skills training of your leaders and managers with Performance Thinking® programs and tools that enable them to:

Conduct conversations that pinpoint performance in actionable ways

Identify and agree on action steps for improving target performance, and

Easily monitor and measure the performance they want to see in their people.

Our Coach-Manage-Lead programs provide a lot more than leadership or management development. Their greatest value comes from empowering leaders and managers as point people for continuous talent development with those who work for them, effectively increasing the organization's human capital and accelerating business results through people.